Five of the top 10 richest college football programs are from the SEC

It should come as no surprise that college football has become a business. So much so, that several of the SEC’s top football programs raked in considerable amounts of cash during the 2015-16 fiscal year — two of which even churned out nine figures worth of revenue during the cycle.

According to figures provided by the U.S. Department of Education, which were obtained by Penn Live, 10 SEC programs were ranked among the top 21 for revenue during this time. The only real surprise was the fact that Alabama did not come out on top of the league’s rankings.

Here are the revenue figures of the top earners for the SEC during the period:

No. 2 Tennessee – $107.1 million

No. 3 Alabama – $103.9 million

No. 7 Auburn – $92.5 million

No. 8 Georgia – $87.6 million

No. 10 LSU – $85.7 million

No. 11 Florida – $83.8 million

No. 13 Texas A&M – $73.7 million

No. 16 Arkansas – $68.9 million

No. 20 South Carolina – $59.6 million

No. 21 Ole Miss – $56.8 million

The school which ranked No. 1 on the list was Texas, with a revenue of $127.5 million. Imagine how much profit that school could make if it had a football program capable of beating Kansas on the gridiron.

A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Michael Wayne Bratton oversees the news coverage for Saturday Down South. Michael previously worked for FOX Sports and NFL.com

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Comments Section (Hot Takes Welcome!)

People dogged Dave Hart pretty bad, but he did a great job financially with the football program. This is nothing new. Tennessee used to have the largest athletic budget before the recent lean years. Now that that finances are stable again, Tennessee needs to turn the monetary success into on-field results.

I’ve lived in both states, and no it isn’t. TN is a wealthier state with a real economy and more urban areas. But, the passion for college football is definitely greater in Alabama. TN is much more of a melting pot. There are a lot of transplants from the Midwest and North. You have pro sports in TN…Preds, Grizzlies, and Titans. The Vols also pretty much have the state to themselves. Most FCS schools in Alabama have bigger game crowds than Vandy. The state of Alabama has a smaller population and still the #3 and #7 schools on that list.

Tennessee has always had one of the wealthiest football programs in the country. Tennessee was ahead of Texas before the Longhorn Network. Tennessee fans are nationwide. Plus having the Haslam family as boosters helps. Plus, you have to take into account that this is just revenue from the past year. Tennessee had one of the worst 6-8 years droughts in football, so I’m sure that Alabama’s Athletic dept is more in the Black than Tennessee. But when Tennessee is rollin’ it right up there with the wealthiest programs in the country.

It’s because the two programs account for football revenue differently. Alabama had $164 million in total athletic revenue while TN only had $136 million. That $28 didn’t come from other sports. Alabama requires things like donating to the general sports fund before you can purchase some of the tickets. That means that money people are using to purchase tickets doesn’t count as football revenue.

It looks like TN just spreads the wealth so to speak after taking the revenue as pure football contributions.

There are different lists, with very different results. The problem is separating pure sports program revenue from 1) donations, 2) merchandising, 3) adjustments made through money management (tax breaks through depreciation, etc), and 4) profit after expenses (coaches salaries, insurance, mortgage costs on facilities, ad infinitum). The key to this list is the word, “revenue,” which is not the same as “most profitable,” “richest”, yada, yada, and the phrase “They may include all or only part of” is really ambiguous. So this list is dependent on how each individual school lists revenue. That skews the numbers because of the really complex accounting laws that affect athletic programs at colleges and universities.

Bottom line, most major college programs are very well off. Total revenue for each school will be very different than this list (Texas A&M took in over $193 million last year, but that does not mean their football revenue tops Tennessee).